The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (41 page)

Now it seemed the secularists had mostly gone weak. At Hawarah, a hundred religious Zionists cast themselves as the new heroes of Jewish national liberation, starring in a remake of building an instant settlement, as Labor Zionists used to do, and of defying the Labor Zionists, as right-wing “separatist” Zionists once did—with the excitement, without the risks. They had their own celebration of resistance, and discovered the joy of feeling righteous by breaking rules.
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Unlike New Leftists, they claimed to act for their own liberation rather than that of someone elsewhere. Their demand for liberated land meant erasing the rights of another group, which was not unusual, except they could see the people they hoped to disinherit. It was the small difference between a city meat-eater and a farm one who has seen the blood. In the Israeli looking-glass, the place for the New Left was filled by the New Right.

The first attempt to establish Elon Moreh failed—but in a terribly encouraging way: Peres refused them permission in the tone of a parent who does not believe his own reasons. Rabin negotiated. The police let them go home. Allies initially doubtful of confrontation joyfully joined in. Next time, surely, they would win, or at least bring more people and feel even more extraordinarily exalted.

With a new prime minister just installed, with Nixon and Kissinger about to arrive in Israel, Hawarah seemed like a one-day incident. It was an incident like a spark in summer thistles and tall grass.

NIXON HAD
good reason in June 1974 to prefer to be in the Middle East rather than in Washington, where the House Judiciary Committee was weighing impeachment. In Cairo, obedient crowds cheered the American president. In Damascus, Hafiz al-Asad kissed him on both cheeks and renewed diplomatic relations, cut off since 1967. In Nixon’s spare time, he nervously listened to Watergate tapes. Former prime minister Golda Meir, who met Nixon in Israel, commented to Kissinger that Israel still had not received a visit from a U.S. president—Nixon’s thoughts, she realized, were elsewhere.
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Kissinger, though, talked business. He wanted to push for another incremental Israeli-Arab agreement. The danger of war remained.
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But reaching a full peace agreement between the Arab countries and Israel was impossible; what the Arabs wanted was beyond what an Israel government could give. Step-by-step diplomacy was best; it kept all sides dependent on the United States and sidelined the Soviets.
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Kissinger may also have suspected that a grand final success would render the United States irrelevant. “I’m a firm believer…that expectation of benefits to come is a greater bond than having received the benefits,” he told Foreign Minister Yigal Allon professorially that summer. “Gratitude is not a governing principle in international affairs.”
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He was therefore engaged in what could be called bicycle diplomacy: If you stopped, you fell off. During Nixon’s visit, Kissinger told Rabin: “You can’t say no movement with Egypt because of the military situation and no movement with Jordan because of the domestic situation and no movement with Syria because of settlements and no movement with the Palestinians because they’re terrorists.” The options were trading more of the Sinai for something closer to peace with Egypt, or seeking an interim agreement with Jordan. Kissinger urged the latter path, because “the way to avoid dealing with the Palestinians is to deal with Jordan.”
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The Palestine Liberation Organization was in fact looking for a way to enter diplomacy, to lay claim to the West Bank and push Jordan aside. The first obstacle was its own ideology, which insisted that Palestine was indivisible and could be liberated only by “armed struggle”—the “absolute violence” of Frantz Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth.
Just before Nixon’s visit, the PLO’s Palestine National Council leapt those hurdles by adopting the so-called phased strategy. The PLO would establish an “independent combatant national authority” on “every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated,” as a step toward taking the rest. To do so, it would use “all means, and first and foremost armed struggle”—implying diplomacy could also be tolerated. Explicitly, the PNC resolution rejected peace or recognition of Israel. The PLO’s nationalism remained total; it rejected anyone else having a claim on the land. Considering a two-state solution remained in an as yet unimagined future. The phased strategy may have been the first small shift toward that future—but it would also provide evidence for any Israeli opposed to talking to the PLO that the organization used diplomacy only as a ruse.
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The resolution was an extreme version of negotiation with oneself. Nonetheless, momentum was growing among Arab leaders to give the PLO the mandate to represent the people of the West Bank. Letting Jordan regain a piece of territory, Kissinger was arguing, would head that trend off by showing that Hussein could deliver the goods.

But Israel’s new government was ill suited to choose. Kissinger had to negotiate with the “troika running overall strategy,” as he called it, of Rabin, Peres, and Allon, a trio afflicted by intrigue and suspicion. “Rabin trusted Allon’s character far more than his intelligence; his estimate of Peres was the precise opposite,” Kissinger found.
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The novice prime minister could neither crush dissent, as Meir had done, nor rally his ministers to work together, nor even schmooze endlessly with them, as Eshkol did.

Nor did Rabin trust his ability to win an election. Despite Kissinger’s warning, therefore, he feared any deal that involved giving up West Bank land. On that point, Peres agreed. Like Dayan, he was willing to offer Hussein only “functional compromise,” in which the West Bank would belong to both sides and neither: Jordan would run civil affairs while Israel’s army stayed put. Since Hussein would not accept that, Peres preferred negotiating with Egypt. Only Allon agreed with Kissinger. Seeking agreement with Jordan was a new chance to show that the Allon Plan could be the basis for peace as well as settlement.
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Allon, like the map of his grand conception, was a figure-ground problem: You could focus on what he wanted to keep, or what he wanted to give up. In the summer of 1967, the first U.S. diplomatic report from Tel Aviv on the Allon Plan had labeled it “Allon’s hardline.”
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When Allon came to Washington a year later, a State Department memo termed him “moderately ‘hawkish.’”
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In June 1974, Kissinger left Israel with no Israeli commitment except that Allon would come soon to the United States. A briefing paper before that visit would label him simply “a moderate.”
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In the new government, he was the compromiser, the diplomatic activist. In the intrigues of the troika, he would complain, Peres used that against him, leaking to the press that “I’m about to turn over the whole West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Jordanians.”
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The “troika,” though, had a fourth member. Yisrael Galili, surviving the postwar Labor purge, remained as fixer and adviser to the new prime minister. The secretive, birdlike man was still in charge of settlement, which was still the way the government wrote its real intentions on the landscape. Under Rabin, Galili increased the pace of his work—spurred, it appears, by the new diplomacy to create more facts, to mark off what could not be conceded. In mid-July, Galili’s Settlement Committee met for the first time under the new government and approved the plan for a town of 5,000 families in the Golan. There were too few Israelis in the Heights, Galili said. Earthworks would begin within weeks. A day later, from the Knesset podium, he answered a demand from Menachem Begin for more settlements. The government was boosting the pace, he said amid Likud heckling. But it would not allow private, “provocative” efforts. Begin’s subtext was support for the Elon Moreh group. Galili’s was that the right talked loudly while Labor acted.
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The U.S. ambassador, Kenneth Keating, got a cable from the State Department. “Israeli statements of intent to expand…settlements in occupied territories have prompted mounting expressions of concern from Saudis,” it said, complaining of the “difficulties such publicity generates in U.S.-Arab relations.” The administration had asked the year before that the Israeli government tamp down such reports, but unfortunately the “effort was hampered by absence of press censorship in Israel on any but purely military matters.”

Still, the embassy was asked to find out what was actually being built—and for its views on how the government “might be induced to turn off public comments on expanding settlements.”
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Keating cabled back two days later. He had already raised the problem with Foreign Minister Allon, who was “quite sympathetic.” Allon would be meeting Israel’s newspaper editors to ask them to play down “sensitive issues” connected to peace negotiations, and “volunteered to add settlement to his list,” the ambassador reported.
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The secretary could rest easy.

Allon, though, had reasons to be edgy. With his U.S. trip approaching, the cabinet had for the first time discussed the Palestinian issue—in itself, a reminder the Meir era was past. To Allon’s satisfaction, the cabinet decision said Palestinian aspirations would have to be met in a “Jordanian-Palestinian” state. The majority rejected a proposal by dovish ministers to announce readiness to talk with any Palestinian group ready to recognize Israel—a position that would have dangled a major reward before the PLO for a dramatic shift in its own stance. On the other hand, the cabinet said that Israel would seek “negotiations for a peace agreement with Jordan,” a final accord resolving all issues. As at least some of Allon’s colleagues read that decision, it meant he had no mandate to discuss the interim deal he favored with Jordan.
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THE NOTE
to Allon had a Levinger touch: The tiny signals acknowledging hierarchy were missing. It presumed young activists could demand a meeting immediately with the foreign minister and get it, to discuss Gush Emunim’s fresh plan for a dozen settlements the length of “Judea and Samaria” and “to find a way for settling in the Shekhem area by the Elon Moreh group without need for confrontation with the authorities.” The note was signed by Moshe Levinger, along with Hanan Porat and Ben-Tzion Heinemann, the rabbi’s disciple now living in the Golan—which, like Hebron and Kfar Etzion, was a place where Allon had pushed settlement. Allon’s recent past was writing to him.

In the mimeographed manifestos attached to the note, Gush Emunim described itself as being “above political parties.” A month and a half after the Hawarah bid, it had cut loose from the National Religious Party and was intent on becoming a mass movement. Though its core members were Orthodox, it sought to reach out to the wider public—meaning the Orthodox would now be the vanguard, the secularists fellow travelers. It would promote “the goals of redemption,” by stressing “attachment to the land and expansion of settlement.” The settlement ethos had been swallowed whole and turned into the means of messianism.

Gush Emunim now spoke for the Elon Moreh group and four other groups that had picked places where they intended to settle. One marked the map at Shilo, where the Israelites offered their sacrifices in the time of the prophet Samuel. In the modern West Bank, it lay between Ramallah and Nablus, in the densely populated Palestinian area that Allon’s map marked for returning to Arab rule. Another group, claiming thirty members, wanted to settle near Jericho—designated by Allon as part of the corridor that would link the East Bank with Ramallah.

To set a meeting, the note said, Allon could contact Porat or Yohanan Fried—the Merkaz Harav student whose explanation of God’s purpose in the Holocaust had not made it into
Soldier’s’ Talk
seven years before. Allon did not answer.
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Porat and Levinger’s goals no longer fit his.

Rabin, though, agreed to meet Elon Moreh organizers Benny Katzover and Menachem Felix immediately after their settlement bid at Hawarah. In Katzover’s description, the prime minister stressed authority: The government would set priorities where to settle. The conversation ended, as Katzover remembered it, with Rabin saying bluntly, “If you think the government is going to follow any lunacy of a few dozen Jews, you’re mistaken,” and with Felix getting the last word, “In that case, you’ll meet hundreds of Jews.”
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The perceived challenge added adrenaline. The Elon Moreh settlement group worked with Gush Emunim. A campaign of parlor meetings began, two hundred sessions that summer, to enlist grassroots support. A young religious Zionist named Meir Harnoy, invited to a neighbor’s house one evening in a staid Tel Aviv suburb, was awed to find Ariel Sharon lecturing. “I tell you that if we don’t begin settling in Judea and Samaria, Jordanian artillery will come to us,” Sharon warned. No one needed convincing, Harnoy felt, but they liked hearing the ex-general confirm their beliefs. Afterward, as Sharon enjoyed “the gastronomic part of the evening,” Yehudah Etzion collected donations.

Two weeks later, Harnoy attended another meeting, in the lunch-room of a public school used as a synagogue by young Orthodox Jews, graduates of yeshivah high schools and Bnei Akiva. Hanan Porat, now one of Gush Emunim’s chief spokesmen, spoke of settling with permission or without, calling up ideas Harnoy had regarded as belonging to pre-state history. The age of heroes was not over, it seemed. At the end of services on a Sabbath morning, a member of the congregation stood to announce what Gush Emunim was planning next. “This is a synagogue,” someone shouted. “Here we don’t make political announcements.” The activist took a chair outside and stood on it as a crowd gathered. The synagogue became a base of Gush Emunim support.
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The same happened elsewhere. At houses of worship, politicized faith had its audience gathered in advance.